The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. Like all such revolutions, it unleashed a great ripple effect of technological waves. The effect has in turn driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. Two of these technologies are the internet-related distribution and object oriented programming systems. Both of these technologies are embodied in the object oriented Java Programming system. The computer and communications industries have been extensively participating in the development and continual upgrading of the Java system. For details and background with respect to the Java system, reference may be made to a typical text, "Just Java", 2nd Edition, Peter van der Linden, Sun Microsystems, Inc., 1997. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for World Wide Web or internet which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility reached "critical mass" and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion which has not as yet abated.
With the expanded accessibility of tens of thousands of programmers to each other, not to mention to potential users of such programs via the expanded internet client base, an obvious need became apparent: cooperative programming systems wherein program developers could coact to continuously expand and enhance existing programs in a distributed programming environment. Also, users could readily obtain and apply these developed programs. Object oriented programming, which had also been virtually languishing for a generation, offered the solution. With its potentially interchangeable objects or units within which both data attributes and functions were stored in a predefined uniform framework, as well as the predefined object interfaces with each other, object oriented programming systems have found acceptance as the programming system for the internet. In all areas of data processing and communications, as well as the electronic entertainment and consumer industries having anything to do with the internet, there has been a substantial movement to Java, the Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s originated object oriented programming system.
While the above described advantages of object oriented programming with respect to collective and cooperative programming are clear, new needs have arisen in these programming systems where literally thousands of program developers and users are continually upgrading and changing the programs. There is a need for programmers and users readily being able to display program documentation in a clear and comprehensive manner in natural language. To this end, the developers of Java Programming have come up with JavaDoc, a documentation generator. JavaDoc generates its documentation with an API (Application Programming Interface) which requires programming objects having common framework structures which include data attributes, methods of manipulating such attributes and data defining predetermined common interfaces between objects. With programming systems based on such objects, JavaDoc will provide standard HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) outputs to computer controlled displays to provide standard natural language displays of the program documentation. HTML has become the display language of choice for the internet or World Wide Web. It is used there for all forms of display documentation including the markup of hypertext and hypermedia documents, usually stored with their respective documents on an internet or web server. HTML is an application of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), an ISO standard for defining the structure and contents of any digital document. It should be recognized that any of the aspects of the present invention illustrated with respect to HTML would be equally applicable to SGML. For further details on Java, JavaDoc or HTML, reference may be made to the above mentioned "Just Java" text or to the text, "Java in a Nutshell", 2nd Edition, by David Flanagan, O'Reilly publisher, 1997. One limitation with the use of the JavaDoc document generator is that what will be included in the documentation is usually predetermined since all data to be used to provide documentation must be structured in the previously described API format. Thus, if others down the line from the prior developers believe that it would be advantageous to include additional comments, annotations or even active messages, the prior Java programming objects would have to be modified to include doc comments within the API framework. This may at times be awkward and inefficient. The present invention provides an alternative approach to enhancing the documentation without modifying existing Java objects.